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This past Thursday evening my wife and I finished loading the trusty personal vehicle at about 6:10pm. We had hoped to leave at 6:00pm but were running late heading off for a nice three-day weekend.....she to visit an old friend in Raleigh, NC and I to ride some trains.
The phone rang and my wife grabbed it on the way out the door. She called me in from the driveway saying "Honey, it's Amtrak" to which I said "Time for Plan B......my train is cancelled."
Sure enough, with the approach of Hanna (a storm which proved to be much ado about not much) CSX was pulling the pin and my train 80 of 9/5 was not going to operate beyond NS territory. Amtrak offered to rebook on another date but that was no good. I needed to be in Joe Biden country on 9/6. I opted for refund instead and pulled out the laptop to initiate plan B. The irony is that I had been tracking Hanna all week and less than an hour earlier (at 5:15pm) the storm seemed to be further east and less deadly than expected. We went ahead and packed because I had concluded that my train would likely run as planned.
Thirty minutes later we headed out for our weekend anyway and spent Thursday night in a hotel near Greensboro, NC.
Friday morning my wife delivered me to the Raleigh/Durham airport instead of the Greensboro Amtrak station. Shortly thereafter I boarded a 737 rather than an Amfleet coach. At about 12:30pm eastern.....five hours sooner than Amtrak would have, Southwest Airlines offloaded me at the Baltimore/Washington Airport.
Southwest Airlines had saved my trip but I still felt a bit shorted having expected to spend the bulk of the day riding a train. So.....to compensate I caught the shuttle over to the BWI Rail Station and caught the next MARC train out, the 1:00pm northbound for Perryville, MD. It was sunny. It was scenic. I sat upstairs in a bilevel commuter coach.
In Perryville 90 minutes later I bought a ticket to Washington Union Station and climbed back aboard the same train that had delivered me to lovely Perryville. I had supper in Union Station and then boarded yet another MARC commuter train back to BWI where the shuttle from the nearby Red Roof Inn picked me up. This hotel, the BWI Red Roof is clean, recently renovated, and reasonably priced. It's kind of short on amenities but there is a sandwich shop next door. My only complaint is that I could not manage to get their wireless internet to work on for my laptop.
Saturday morning I was up at 6am, showered, dressed, and caught the Red Roof van over to the BWI Car Rental facility, a large new complex. By 7:05am I was in my Hertz rental (I've tried others but I always come back to Hertz in the end) wheeling towards Pennsylvania under threatening skies. The weather felt downright tropical and I knew that this was Hanna's fault.
After a stop for breakfast and another rest stop......staying just minutes ahead of the rain...I pulled into the Steamtown parking lot in Scranton, PA shortly before 11:30am. By the time I had a sandwich at the Steamtown Mall it was raining.....moderately hard but nowhere near as hard as one might expect from a tropical storm. There was nowhere near the wind I had expected (compared to when Hurricane Fran roared over my Fayetteville, NC home in 1996) either. Just a steady hard rain.
I milled about under the shed at the Steamtown Excursion platform as our train pulled in. Today a 1917 Canadian National Mikado steam locomotive is pulling 8 1920's era heavyweight coaches and a single business car on the end. About 480 passengers surged aboard for the excursion up to Clark's Summit and beyond to the famed Tunkhannock Viaduct.
The train backed out to the wye right on time at 1:00pm and began it's assault on the 4% grade once the switches were thrown. I sat in the first coach and hoisted the window. In flew some smoke, lots of cinders (we were burning soft coal.....not the hard anthracite traditionally burned here by Ms. Phoebe's railroad), and some rain. The smell of coal smoke and the sound of that locomotive at work up that grade was exhilerating and worth every penny I spent to be there. Our engineer was said to be in his 80's having hired out on the Delaware & Hudson Railroad as a teeneager in 1945. He had actually managed to become an engineer and run steam before it was withdrawn in the 50's. Now in retirement he volunteers as an engineer at Steamtown and just lives for every opportunity to take one of the steam locomotives out on the mainline. It's a story so good I hope it's true. Regardless, the hand on the throttle Saturday got us moving and up that mountain on wet rails without a single detectable wheel slip. This was a seasoned pro in the cab and to heck with that diesel that was standing by to give us a shove in case we stalled out.
We made it to the viaduct and sat there for a few minutes taking in the sights from 240 feet in the air. We then pushed on for another four miles or so to the next stretch of runaround track. The locomotive moved to the rear of the train and pulled us back to Scranton arriving about 4:30pm.
Bear in mind that the entire excursion was run in moderate to heavy rain. It did not let up for a second.
Sooo.....the Park Rangers and their pre-1925 technology accomplished on this rainy afternoon what any Amtrak train on any CSX line south of Richmond, VA could not. They moved a trainload of passengers......480 of us........up that mountain without incident.....and with equipment more irreplacable than anything on Amtrak's roster.
Sooo.....the grades
A - Steamtown......the engineers who designed the Tunkhannock Viaduct. Southwest Airlines for saving the trip and getting me there without charging an arm and a leg. Hertz for unexpected free upgrade.
B - MARC - Yes, you're running, but could you maybe wash your trains a little more often? I had dirty windows on all three MARC trains I rode and it didn't used to be that way.
C - Amtrak. Even though it wasn't your fault, you failed to get me where I was going. The 737 succeeded.
D - (and I'm being veeeeerrry generous) CSX for panicking and cancelling too much service too soon. You keep doing this and no one will believe you when you realllyyy mean it. Maybe the folks from Steamtown could put their NPS uniforms on, pay a visit to CSX headquarters, and teach them a thing or two about carrying passengers in bad weather.
Or maybe not -
-------------------- David Pressley
Advocating for passenger trains since 1973!
Climbing toward 5,000 posts like the Southwest Chief ascending Raton Pass. Cautiously, not nearly as fast as in the old days, and hoping to avoid premature reroutes. Posts: 4203 | From: Western North Carolina | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
Mr. Presley, lest we forget the days of "Center to Center All-Weather Service" (New Haven) or "Your Trip is Weather-Proof" (DL&W) are over. Somehow today, it seems that passenger railroads "pull the pin' long before air transport "grounds 'em" when weather threatens. While it is quite likely that CSX lines are more vulnerable than others to weather interference affecting Amtrak operations, one must wonder, when ACL and SAL provided essential passenger transportation to the region, did they "pull the pin' as quickly as does CSX.
I think much of these seemingly arbitrary (at least to Amtrak passengers) embargoes can be attributed to the 'detente' that I believe exists between Amtrak and the Class I roads - again that is "if you (Amtrak/Congress) do not dream up adding trains at your pleasure to run over our rails and do not place unreasonable burdens on our operations (timekeeping, adverse weather), we will in turn accept your existing trains as a continuing "nuisance' - even though they were to have been gone some thirty years ago".
Posts: 9977 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002
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Granted that CSX is more vulnerable with their dispatching coming out of Jacksonville but they seem almost afraid to run trains......at least passenger trains......when there is even the smallest threat.
(A potential hurricane 36 hours from landfall is not a small threat but it seems to me the trains could have gone for another 18 hours or so.)
Over the years I've been on Amtrak trains operating at restricted speed (10 mph) for HOURS on CSX due to
A) Possible sun kinks B) Possible high water C) Lightning Struck signals D) Frozen switches E) Frozen signals F) Unexpected icing freezing switches and signals
The detente with CSX shows it's strain anytime there is something CSX fears being a possible lawsuit it seems.
I'm reminded of a delightful trip in April 2004 aboard the Canadian from Vancouver to Winnipeg. On the full day aboard departing Jasper it began to snow. The train whipped along at track speed arriving early at every station and waiting for time all the while travelling through a spring blizzard. The views from the dome were spectacular.
I said to my wife that if we ever encountered similar weather aboard an Amtrak train along CSX we would crawl at 10 mph for several hours and then grind to a stop being told that the switces were frozen.
That's exactly the scenario we encountered just 8 months later aboard the Auto-Train! Things were fine upon leaving Sanford but when I woke up the following morning we were five hours late and crawling through Fayetteville, NC.
No point here really.......I agree with your assessment and, frankly, find a short, non-stop Southwest flight to Baltimore or Chicago a more suitable jumping off point for my rail adventures than those Amtrak trains which move up and down the Atlantic Coast on CSX rails.
-------------------- David Pressley
Advocating for passenger trains since 1973!
Climbing toward 5,000 posts like the Southwest Chief ascending Raton Pass. Cautiously, not nearly as fast as in the old days, and hoping to avoid premature reroutes. Posts: 4203 | From: Western North Carolina | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
Notelvis- My wife and I began a long auto jaunt on Friday and can attest to CSX being shut down. As usual, we stopped in Selma about lunch time. She went to a quilt store, while I headed for the station. Signs were posted that CSX canceled all trains for Friday and Saturday due to Hannah. The NCDOT caretaker there said the morning trains had run. Presumably the prior days' Meteor and Star.
I have to agree, it is hard to understand with today's technology why inclement weather ties CSX and Amtrak in knots. I suspect it's the lack of men in the field - who used to sweep switches, man the towers, maintain the signals, and provide supervision and support.
Maybe CSX's move to send the dispatchers back to the field will help, but I doubt it. I believe the Florence Division (Richmond to Savannah) dispatchers will be back in Florence this year, if not already. That's full circle from the great centralization that occurred in the late '80's.
Posts: 2397 | From: Camden, SC | Registered: Mar 2006
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